WESTERN THEATRE: It Begins

The fury of the Nazi air attack on Britain mounted last week. But the most ominous event caused no death and destruction: Germany suspended all non-military traffic, even the mails, in northwestern France and western Belgium and Holland, “sealed” those areas—just as she had done along her western border just before the terrible Whitsuntide Blitzkrieging into The Lowlands. Britons who had been waiting for “It” to begin, the dread Battle of Britain, had no longer to wait.

As usual, the pattern of what had been expected from the Germans failed to occur. Instead of trying to knock out the Royal Air Force before attempting anything else, Germany had another plan: blow out the lifelines. Raiding squadrons of bombers, sometimes 80 and 100 strong, escorted by fighters, had already struck time & again at Devonport, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton, Newhaven, Dover, especially hard at the bustling docks of the Thames Estuary. Shipping in the English Channel—embattled Britain’s turbulent moat only 22 miles wide at its narrowest (Dover-Calais)—had been incessantly attacked by German aircraft and motor torpedo boats based just across the water in sight of Britain’s headlands. Last week the attacks reached crescendo.

Swarms of Stukas dived on every passing merchantman, sinking ten out of 21 vessels in a single convoy of small ships guarded only by trawlers due to a growing shortage of destroyers. Far to the north, above Ireland, German bombers attacked a convoy that had been sent around that way because the British had mined St. George’s Channel between Eire and Wales. Messerschmitt fighters accompanying Nazi bombers to Britain started carrying one medium-sized bomb apiece. Everything that flew over Britain now had something to leave there. The Nazi High Command claimed that its submarines, motor torpedo boats, bombers sank more than 200,000 tons of British ships during the week, including the destroyers Brazen and Wren (both admitted).

“New Tactic.” The German war communique of Saturday, July 27, told of successful air attacks on “port facilities at Cardiff, Aberthoaw and Hastings . . . the railroad junction at Tunbridge Wells and big oil tanks at Thames Haven.” Significantly Telegrafo, the Leghorn daily owned by Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano, who visited Hitler and Goring in Berlin last fortnight, observed over the weekend: “. . . To those—and they are millions—who are asking, ‘When will the great hostilities against the British Isles begin?’, yesterday’s communique seems to reply, ‘But don’t you see that it has already begun?’

“. . . The German generals are deliberately prolonging the enervating suspense. They want to conquer London by isolating it from the nearby arteries which every morning unload in Covent Garden, in Billingsgate and on the docks tons and tons of foodstuffs that London does not produce and without which the 7,000,000 inhabitants of the city could not resist one month.”

The Germans’ “new tactic,” said Telegrafo, had a simple aim: “Starving the British.”

Total Battle. Thinking of everything, the Germans as they began to strike Britain full force, redoubled their efforts to undermine British morale. “When Paris was besieged by the Germans in 1871,” they broadcast, “food became so short that a pound of dog meat cost two and eightpence (64¢) and a cat was valued at eleven shillings and threepence. The animals in the Zoo were slaughtered and elephant meat cost 15 shillings a pound. Is England likely to see such a day?” They advised housewives to hoard food for emergency. “Make personal arrangements with farmers, gardeners and chicken farms within walking distance of your home and pay a cash advance.”

British mothers were told by the German radio that their children were in danger, only offspring of the rich could go abroad. The destruction of Warsaw, when 70% of all the houses were razed, was described (in contrast to the preservation of Paris, which surrendered). “After the first day of the bombardment, the town was without gas, water and electric lights. Water for household purposes had to be drawn from the River Vistula. The danger of epidemics was imminent, as the sewer system had been destroyed by the German bombs. The contents of the sewer pipes had penetrated into the air raid cellars, which had become the last refuge of the population for many days.

“Several months after the campaign, dead bodies were still found under ruins of the houses.”

But the British did not scare easily. At a town in Scotland, admission was charged to see bomb craters, the proceeds going to the Red Cross. In Wales, people happily gathered up a mess of fish blown to the surface when bombs fell in a river. When the military relaxed a rule last weekend, thousands of civilians went bathing at Brighton within sight and sound of Germany’s air raiders. Minister of Health Malcolm MacDonald, admitting that every German bomb landing in an urban district had killed one and injured three people (rural areas were 15 times safer), gave the following whimsical figures for other casualties per bomb: .1 of a hen, .1 of a pig, .01 of a sheep, .006 of a cow, .0007 of a rabbit.

How Long? Even though It had begun, the British calmly planned for a long war. Minister for Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook announced a program to build factories in the U. S. capable of supplying 3,000 planes per month for Britain. He must have known as William Knudsen did in Washington that 3,000

U. S. planes a month could not be delivered till 1942 (see p. 17).

Meantime, R. A. F. kept up its intense bombing of Germany’s bases, new and old, across the Channel. At Nantes, St. Nazaire and Cherbourg they blew up huge oil tanks and refineries originally intended to supply the B. E. F. In London, a Swedish sailor just returned from Germany gave eye-witness testimony of the weight and accuracy of British bombing which confirmed the impression that Britain, sending over never less than 50 planes every good flying night, for a total of more than 1,000 raids since May i, had damaged Germany as badly as Germany had damaged Britain—up to last week.

Every day’s delay thus gained, every obstacle placed before it, gave added time for Britain’s preparation of home defense against invasion. For no Briton doubted that only by coming and getting them could Germany conquer the British. And by last week the last great democracy of Europe was truly an “island fortress” ringed by air and naval power, manned by 1,500,000 British soldiers, two Canadian divisions, several battalions of Australians and New Zealanders, 30,000 Polish, French and Czech troops. Last week with the calling of 34-year-olds, 4,100,000 Britons were registered for Army service. Behind all these were 1,400 battalions of Local Defense Volunteers, whose name was last week changed to the Home Guard (thus robbing the L. D. V. of their slogan, “We’ll give ’em Hell D. V.”). The Home Guard are older men, trained at night and over weekends, with a hard core of War I veterans. Their officers’ chief concern was to make them overcome their scruples, be prepared to demolish British property when necessary to exterminate Germans.

This week 200,000 of them were given the task of patrolling Britain’s railroad lines at night.

Last week news correspondents were taken on tour through Britain’s southern defenses. They were impressed. Also, they were curious, because the man who built them was raised last fortnight to be Commander in Chief of the entire British Army at home, and he is a man almost as obscure among world military figures as France’s belatedly called defense chief, Weygand, was celebrated: General Sir Alan Francis Brooke.

Brooke’s Barricade. What the correspondents saw was a defense-in-depth system beginning at the beaches with barbed wire and machine-gun nests, some of them made of bathing machines (bath houses on wheels) filled with pebbles. Tank traps, road blocks, concealed artillery filled the defense zone to a depth of 20 miles (see pictures, p. 31). Mobile and mechanized forces were poised farther inland, to be rushed wherever needed. The system was the same, with improvements based on bitter experience, as the one which Sir Alan constructed between Lille and the Somme last winter while the B. E. F. Second Corps, which he commanded, was marking time. Observers believe that, had the French commanders prepared as wisely and industriously as Sir Alan, instead of relying on the thin pillbox line of their Maginot extension, the German breakthrough could not have been so swift and disastrous. In France the Brooke system never had a chance to prove itself, for after being ordered into, then out of Belgium, the Second Corps was swung south of its prepared positions in a brief effort to close the fatal Peronne-Bapaume gap. Then it was ordered to Dunkirk, where Sir Alan’s rear-guard action and evacuation won him his knighthood.

If generals in other countries were surprised at Sir Alan’s appointment as Britain’s land-defense chief, British generals understood. He is no scintillating genius, but the job he did, in one week, of whipping together the Southern command out of tens of thousands of exhausted men who were landed back in England, scattered at different ports, when Germany was expected to follow them across the Channel at any moment, was called “the major feat of organization in British Army history.”

Sir Alan’s chief reputation rests on his skill in artillery. But he has served in the cavalry, commanded infantry, and two jobs that he performed just before the war made him the best-posted, all-around officer Britain has. The first was Commander of the Mobile Division in 1937-38. Just when he had mastered tank, antitank and armored car technique, for which he had great enthusiasm, War Secretary Hore-Belisha switched him into the Anti-Aircraft Corps Command. He found it a scratch bunch of guns without instruments, searchlights or coordination. In a year he smoothed and built it into seven highly efficient up-to-date divisions.

Reverence for tradition is not part of Commander in Chief Sir Alan’s makeup. When he took the Second Corps to France he told his officers not to forget their textbooks and Staff College learning, but not to rely on it. Against new and surprising methods he is prepared to improvise. Whether they come by air or whether they come by sea, the Germans will find Britain’s land chief on his toes to meet them. One surprise may be full-size tanks landed by airplane. Last month an air-wise U. S. observer beheld, flying over Paris, a German ship of such huge proportions it could carry a trolley car in its belly.

Except for Prime Minister Churchill, Britain’s defense forces have no supreme commander to coordinate the air, sea and land arms. There are air commanders for bombers, fighters, all under Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall. Chief of the home naval defense is Admiral Sir Charles Morton Forbes, under First Lord of the Admiralty Albert Victor Alexander and First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Under Sir Alan are six subordinate com mands: Southern, Aldershot, Northern, Eastern, Western, Scottish.

Gangsters. Discovered in London last fortnight was a mobile defense unit against parachutists, formed and drilled secretly (lest the U. S. State Department become exercised). It was composed of 60 Americans with property and interests in Britain. Commander was Brigadier General Wade Hampton Hayes (retired), 61, onetime Sunday editor of the old New York Tribune, member of General Pershing’s staff in World War I. A leading spirit was Charles Sweeney, 30, of Federation Bank & Trust Co., sporting brother of onetime (1937) British Amateur Golf Champion Robert (“Bob”) Sweeney, who now lives in the U. S. Brother Robert helped the group lay hands on 100 Thompson submachine guns and some Winchester automatics. British authorities let them have ten heavily armored cars, six motorcycles, a quantity of heavy automatic arms and ammunition, radio equipment and a special wavelength. They train with the Scots Guards every weekend, attend evening lectures thrice a week. Strictly outside U. S. law, the new unit was nicknamed “The Gangsters.”

Burglars. Targets for the Gangsters and other parashots will be a new class of parachute troops announced by Germany last week, trained to land on city housetops, equipped with burglar tools to break in, silken ropes down which to slide to the ground. They carry kernels of concentrated soot to make their own smoke screens while descending and after landing. Germany’s “sealing” of the Maginot Line district last week, as well as the areas facing Britain, was interpreted as a precaution to keep prying eyes from seeing these burglars and other special troops at practice on new wrinkles for It.